“Throw the switch!” The speaker was a picture-perfect hunchback, looming over the machinery in a grungy laboratory smock. “Quickly, doctor, while they’re still distracted! Throw the switch and bring our glorious monster to life!”
The crowd burst into exuberant applause.
“Quickly, Doctor Frankenstein! It’s too late to turn back!” The hunchback didn’t need to drop the name for everyone to know the character. I spotted the doctor now, cowering by a control panel. He made a magnificent Mad Scientist: his Asian black hair was uncommonly wild and wiry in the right way, his shoulders had the academic hunch under the white lab coat, and his hands, forever stained with inks and dyes, had the right inhuman thinness to let him stand proud on a poster between a Werewolf and a Mummy. Even his Chinese features in this context focused the attention on his eyes, almost as black as his hair, and greenish makeup made their glints feel extra maniacal. Poor Cato Weeksbooth. With the eyes of the world upon him, the recluse seemed about to have a heart attack.
Eager ‘Igor’ stared expectantly at his Frankenstein, but Cato just gaped, his jaw twitching as if he were on the edge of saying lines, but nothing came.
“Quickly, doctor! I don’t know how long we can keep the villagers from invading the laboratory!”
Igor was right. The spectators had recovered from the shock of the reveal, and were beginning to advance and poke the edges of the set.
“I can’t do this…”
“You must! There’s no turning back!”
“Why’d you drag me into this? Leave me alone!”
The hulking assistant gestured with a too-huge prop wrench toward the shrouded figure, lifeless on the table between them. “You must finish, doctor! You will! There’s nowhere to turn back to. You’ve already shattered the laws of man, of king and country, medicine, conscience, humanity. There’s no forgiveness now, nothing waiting for you but the gallows or the asylum. You have only one choice! Push on, doctor! Shatter the next laws too, the laws of Nature! Then, with the powers of life and death at your command, and your glorious creation at your side, you will lord it over your enemies like a god! Throw the switch!”
I myself am not sure whether the ‘unwilling Frankenstein’ act was a plan, or an ad lib to cover Cato’s genuine stage terror. Either way, there was a chilling passion in his “Noooo!”
“Junior Scientist Squad Attack!” Suddenly a gaggle of kids, aged eight to fifteen, with matching “Chicago Museum of Science and Industry” caps, assaulted Igor with an arsenal of homemade slingshots, water balloons, rubber band guns, and all manner of ingenious and benign projectiles.
“You leave the doctor alone, you meanie!”
“Don’t worry, doc! We’ll save you!”
Cato slumped back against the buzzing control panels, pale with joy as if the homemade weapons had been Athena’s spear. “You came…”
Two girls in the back of the squad, the “big guns,” fed baking soda into a vinegar bottle through a funnel and let the ensuing explosion drench the adversary. “Eat real science, phony!”
“Noooo!” Igor staggered as if the drenching were a mortal wound, and, since the vinegar spoiled the makeup, it almost was. “I won’t let you stop us!” Wild-eyed, the hunchback charged forward through the hail of rubber bands, lunged past quivering Cato, and threw the switch himself.
The video footage can do the special effects far more justice than I. There were explosions from the machines, rains of sparks, projections of monstrous faces and equations which chased each other through the smoke as if human ambition and the laws of nature were fighting it out before our eyes, and a soundtrack by Lune Cassirer which would be top seller for four weeks.
The body beneath the shroud twitched, jolts of sudden motion like the spasms of electrocution, real enough to cause some in the audience to wonder whether the equipment had malfunctioned. The body lay still next, not even breathing, letting the suspense and music build as a subtle odor of singed meat diffused through the gallery. Only as the last of the wires ceased their hissing did the body twitch once more, then rise, letting the shroud slide down slowly, like the unveiling of a statue. Makeup had reduced the flawless skin to patchwork, dozens of painted shades from north-European pallor to deep African black, which seemed to be sutured together with a gory roughness which only made the perfection of the face and limbs beneath more beautiful in contrast. It was a light, athletic, nymphlike figure, with a childish face and slender, androgynous limbs, every mark of beauty that Duke Ganymede was losing as a decade in office tainted him with the roughness of a grown-up. The monster faltered as it rose, unbalanced like a fresh-hatched chick, and slumped back against the slab, its eyelids sagging like a sleepwalker’s. Desperate Igor (recovering from the assault of vinegar) pressed through the cluster of awe-silenced kids and grasped the monster’s face, peering warmly into it. “Welcome to life, Sniper.”
Sniper’s eyes are huge like a child’s, almost black thanks to a Japanese mother, but somehow the genius actor made that blackness seem to transform from dull to lively in this moment, as if it were not the electricity but this first sight of another human face that jump-started true life. “Thank you.”
The crowd could not hold back its applause.
“Magnificent!”
“Spectacular! Heart-stopping!” critics raved.
“Even better than last year!”
“And far less destructive,” Ganymede added, rolling his eyes in memory of Sniper’s rampage in gangster’s pinstripes, complete with tommy gun and femme fatale, when the techs had dropped two Model Ts through a ballroom skylight and led the Duke President’s security on a fifteen-minute cops-and-robbers car chase through the galleries. The poor carpets.
Sniper, all smiles, descended from the laboratory table arm in arm with his hunchbacked ‘creator.’ (I confess, reader, there is some arbitrariness in calling Sniper by either pronoun, since these stunts involve female costume as often as male, and Sniper’s publicity team has worked so hard to keep the public from learning the androgyne’s true sex. But since I have made Sniper’s two key rivals, Ockham and Ganymede, both ‘he,’ I shall use ‘he’ for Sniper, to make their strengths feel parallel). At Sniper’s nod the lights returned, so guests could see and thank the black-hooded techies who had made the spectacle possible.
A mob gathered to admire the painstaking stitch-work makeup which made Sniper’s naked chest and back seem to be a quilt of real transplanted skin, each patch different not only in color but in texture and moisture, some old, some young, even with the grain of hairs flowing in different directions. Shirtless Sniper is even more tantalizingly androgynous, since the delicacy of his build and tightness of his muscles makes it impossible to guess whether this torso is naturally male or an Amazon, a common enough practice among female Humanist athletes who aim at mixed sports early in life, so have the doctors prevent breasts from developing, opting out of their varied inconveniences.